What I find really interesting is that all these studios who ran TV channels for so many years fumbled the bag when it came to streaming.. It's like all these people who basically were in content distribution didn't really wise up to the next, new thing in their business even as it happened in front of their eyes.
It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially given that they provide access to top shows that people really want to watch. It's like having Breaking Bad-esque product but really screwing up when it comes to wanting people to watch it.
Given the extent to which the tech behind streaming platforms -- storage, CDNs, tie-ups with telecoms -- have been standardized (and democratized, to some extent) by big players like YouTube and Netflix, you would think that a basic ad supported layer of any of these studio specific platforms would make many multiples of what they actually need to put in to setup a basic platform.
The tech's cheap and they already have the content. Most of the older content would be relatively low traffic -- hell, most of these old topical Comedy Central late night shows barely broke a million views when they were new and I don't think jokes about Saddam Hussein and GW's folksy demeanor would click now. How much would it really cost for any big studio to let people view these archives? Am I missing something big that causes somebody like Paramount to go $14B in debt trying to get people to use their streaming service? Is it a function of the business they're in or is it just a case of LA movie studio types not understanding tech?
These studios used to make ton of money because only a few are in town. Now, every teenager is his/her own studio and content pool is so vast that their revues must shrink. They have nowhere to run. I think their end state is to publish on YouTube/Netflix and continue living at fraction of revenue that they are used to. That's what they should prepare for and plan for. Their existence and importance was supported by scarcity imposed by cable network and they need to understand that. But instead they live in fantasy of becoming next Netflix and burn in billions of dollars in debt.
This is compelling and I think many elements of the spirit of this are true. The only thing I would add is that it will be interesting to see if professional, medium/high budget, polished, "produced" content will remain a stable and significant niche that is distinct from user-generated content. And does the high-production-value content directly compete with low-production value user-created content? And what percentage of a user's consumption it will represent in the future? And does the pool of available time for an individual consumer grow to accommodate both?
To put it another way, on some level, all content competes for our time, so it's all in competition. On a different level, a Twitch livestream or TikTok feels like an entirely different category of media from a scripted, high-production-value TV series or movie, and I want both in the world.
While traditional publishers may be losing % of daily media consumption - especially in younger age brackets - it's unclear to me where this trend asymptotes. My intuition is that most people will spend some time on "reels" or livestreams (or whatever), some time on blockbuster movies, some on Broadway plays, and some time on scripted produced "TV style" content. Some will expand their denominator of total time to accommodate additional media sources, others will pick one over the other.
It seems there will be a degree of loss of market share as you allude to, but it's unclear how dramatic it will be and where it stabilizes.
One thing is absolutely 100% for sure though in my opinion: media preservation should be deeply prioritized, and this news seems like a blow to that.
Yesterday was MTV News deleting their archive, right? But on your points: brace yourselves for AI-generated content, with increasing technical quality and probably also increasing entertainment quality. That will be The Flood and might wipe out the small human creators by their lack of discoverability, and replace the studios output because hey AI is cheaper than employing real humans. So what do we do then??? Also no archives because shareholder value (I think I use this term already too much)...
I think their numbers are BS, just like Hollywood's numbers have always been BS. Remember when Lord of the Rings lost money for New Line somehow?
Paramount's supposedly got 71,000,000 subscribers. At ~$10/month, they're making something like $8,500,000,000 / yr in subscriber fees. You gotta be daft to lose money on that.
At like a $1,000,000 / episode (last numbers I heard, might be old) that's 8,500 episodes of television a year. Pretty sure they didn't make anywhere near that much content last year. Seems like mostly all they're doing is taking away content and then charging you for it again. Disney already plays this game pretty extensively.
-2.8% annual return since Jan 2006, 4.25% annual return since Jun 2009, and their 5 and 10 year annual returns are way worse (dqdyj total return calculator doesn’t even provide a percentage return).
I think you're right. People never had all the content we can access today. So the real competitors of those few big providers are now the millions of people creating new content every day on social media, YouTube, etc.
> But instead they live in fantasy of becoming next Netflix and burn in billions of dollars in debt.
Hell, even ~15+ years ago I knew not to fall for cargo-culting arguments of "come work for us; when we're as valuable as Facebook the stock we'll pay you with will make you a billionaire". Yeah, ... sorry, not moving to Silicon Valley and try to haggle for coffee with imaginary invaluable stocks.
So, I can't believe that ... for all their money's worth, these companies can only come up with "when we have as much users as Netflix, we'll be billionaires".
The worst part is that we already had a perfectly viable model: Netflix paid for the rights to everything and gave access to everybody for a reasonable monthly fee. Then the studios got greedy and thought "why should we let a middleman take a slice of our profits?" They took back the rights and started their own streaming services thinking that people would be happy to pay the same amount of money to access the tiny bit of content that they liked from that studio as they were previously paying to get everything. Inevitably, nobody could afford 10 subscriptions, and now their crappy services have reduced subscriber numbers and are either struggling to make a profit or going bankrupt.
> Netflix paid for the rights to everything and gave access to everybody for a reasonable monthly fee. Then the studios got greedy and thought "why should we let a middleman take a slice of our profits?"
To be fair to the studios, sticking with Netflix would have been suicide.
Put yourself at the mercy of someone else's distribution monopoly and you end up a powerless, penniless sharecropper - like people who develop mobile apps.
A good strategy might have been to pool their resources and create a new global channel that they all part-owned and distribute their content there. Like a big new Global TV Channel.
While not global, that was essentially what Hulu was originally for the US. A single streaming platform co-owned by many of the big networks. You could watch FOX, NBC, ABC, and other shows all on a single streaming platform.
Notably absent at the time though were many of the big cable networks and movie studios.
Interestingly Disney was not an original partner of Hulu and was late to the game. ABC was added several years into Hulu's history. The original partners were GE (before they sold NBC Universal to Comcast), News Corporation (Fox), and a private equity firm. That Hulu did not just become Peacock (or really that Comcast didn't need to create Peacock because it might have already majority owned Hulu in that alternate timeline) and is now a Disney property is a fascinating story in GE's mistakes, Disney's ambitions, and Hulu's seeming lack of ambitions, with a soupçon of the usual private equity meddling.
You're right about Disney not being original, I was wrong about that. But they became a partner two years into its existence. I don't know if I'd call that late to the game.
This system is not stable though. Every participant would think "why should I be content with X/N divided revenue if my content is so hot that if I pull out I would get much better revenue because everybody watches my content anyway?" Of course, they miss the point that everybody watches their content as part of the "one subscription" deal but it would be much different when it "50 subscriptions, all alike" deal - but everybody thinks they would be the ones that everybody would subscribe to, and the others would be the ones who will be left out.
Also, such channel would likely attract attention of the regulators as a clear example of a cartel.
Would you really have preferred Netflix to be your monopolistic cable company raising rates all the time whenever they decided to and blaming it on a new contract with Disney or a union strike with the Writer's Guild? How much would you pay for Netflix a month before that got to be too irritating? $50? $150?
The cable companies got to do it for so long because of the natural monopolies of shared physical infrastructure. To be fair, Netflix has been a major internet infrastructure company and there are arguments to be made about their colocation and peering agreements and the natural monopolies there that gave them an early streaming edge, even if the internet in its early days decided those sort of infrastructure agreements shouldn't create or promote monopolies. But beyond that first mover advantage and with the internet's spirit that peering and colocation are regulated fairly and not monopolistically, who would have gave Netflix the right to become the internet's TV monopoly? Would you have voted for a President who made it a campaign promise to make sure that FCC Regulators declared Netflix a legal monopoly in charge of TV streaming?
Netflix only really ever had the first mover advantage, and it is probably a good thing in the eventual long term that Netflix didn't win everything. It goes that Netflix's early model while it felt "perfectly viable" from a consumer standpoint at the time was obviously not perfectly viable in the long term as a stable situation. The situation we are in now of too many streaming services and cutthroat competition between them maybe isn't sustainable in the long term and certainly doesn't feel "viable" to us as consumers. But it certainly seems more viable and preferable than the timeline where you need to send letters to your local Congress representatives in the hopes that they might legislate Netflix price increases and put FCC pressure on Netflix to serve the content they promised to serve.
Literally no part of that was viable - Netflix didn't even buy 5% of US produced current TV content, less than 10% of film, maybe 1% if we generously round up of archive content, and most of what they bought was already paid for by Network airings or earlier windows.
And even then, Netflix was burning billions of dollars of cash every year to keep operating.
> It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially given that they provide access to top shows that people really want to watch. It's like having Breaking Bad-esque product but really screwing up when it comes to wanting people to watch it. ... The tech's cheap and they already have the content.
This might not be evident, but ViacomCBS/Paramount back catalog is by and large available on Pluto.TV.
In their app it's available played back from VOD as if linear television in highly targeted "channels" which is convenient if you want to have something "on in the background".
More conveniently, it is also available as an Apple TV "Channel" for PlutoTV that makes too many old shows to ever watch available as VOD.
This also seems to be a catalog behind various house branded linear+VOD TVs, e.g. Samsung, Vizio, Comcast... The tell you're looking at a Pluto white label seems to be the TV grid organization by genre.
Because of the rights, it has all the old Star Trek related series, the old Doctor Who, and countless shows of every variety that had been on CBS, Paramount, Viacom, etc. in the past. If you watched 8 hours a day with no repeats, you'd have over 35 years of TV ahead of you...
Ask a media company head in 2005 for a half a billion dollars to roll out a subscriber service which 23% of the US adult population could even use, which needed a custom decoder box, and which they could charge $10 a month for, and which would eventually destroy the market they were currently making all their money in.
It's more a failure of management. All the big, legacy players were co-owners of Hulu around 2010. The success of Netflix, and to a lesser extent HBO Max, give them envy, and they all went off on their own to build something. The problem was there were more streaming services than people wanted.
> It's like all these people who basically were in content distribution didn't really wise up to the next, new thing in their business even as it happened in front of their eyes.
I think you ought to give them a bit more credit than that.
I think the problem is that launching a streaming service is basically going into competition with their cable partners. It wasn't worth jeopardising their cable revenue at that time.
I'm reminded of how trademarks work: If you don't bother to defend them, then you lose them. Maybe copyright should be the same way: If you're not distributing copies any longer, you lose the copyright protection.
I'm pretty open to doing something like this broadly, but I think this is especially important for software.
Things like video games are much harder to archive than text. Keeping them running 70 years after the death of the author is already a herculean task. Doing that, when no copies are being distributed could make that entirely impossible.
The current copyright system is going to rob the public domain of many of the cultural treasures that we are entitled to.
While this is a great idea, it's generally illegal for IA to share that content. And it's looking increasingly unlikely IA will be in existence 90 years from now, so it's unclear there'd be a point in them simply archiving it. If copyright were 14 years, if give IA a lot more of a chance of still being around then.
And apparently the videos are no longer available to download, so it's not an option, anyway.
Barring some change of heart by the copyright holder, these episodes are gone forever.
One can hope. I hoard my own interests (this wasn't one of them) but don't distribute it. Good luck seeing any of it ever. A lot of it would be out of copyright with a 24-year term.
It’s a trade. The default state of affairs is no copyright protection.
Society has decided to trade a limited duration monopoly on the copyright of the work, in order to promote more works being created so that we have more works in the public domain.
The entire purpose of copyright is to generate works for the public domain.
So, when the current copyright system fails to do that, we should change that.
You can’t seriously tell me that if we had a law that said: if you don’t make a video game available commercially for 30 years, it enters the public domain, that would have a meaningful impact on the number of video games created.
> The entire purpose of copyright is to generate works for the public domain.
Is it? Or do we just think on average, producing more copyrighted works adds to the greatness and happiness of our society?
The writing of Harry Potter has brought joy to hundreds of millions of people. The production of a renowned textbook like SICP helps educate an entire generation of professionals and raise the nation's productivity.
In general, copyright is intended to help more good texts become available, either under a limited monopoly, or later in public domain.
(Same thing with patents, that were intended to help more inventions be published, and not be lost as trade secrets, while also helping to build businesses around them..)
Because they published it; they were free not to do so if they didn't want anybody to reproduce or distribute it (in fact that seems like the easiest way to do so).
In order to encourage more people to make these works, however, our government grants them a temporary, limited monopoly on the work's reproduction and distribution, but this is a means to an end that we agree to for utilitarian reasons, not some kind of actual inherent right on their part or responsibility on mine.
> Because they published it; they were free not to do so if they didn't want anybody to reproduce or distribute it
Copyright protects works at the moment they are created, not when they are reproduced or distributed. Most of the works under copyright protection have never been distributed.
Not really, copyright and trade secrets have different subject matter. There are many things could qualify as trade secrets but not creative works (e.g. a recipe), and many things that qualify as creative works but not trade secrets (e.g. a song).
Once it becomes a cultural artifact it becomes more than just "someone's work". The goal of legislation is / should be to figure out how to balance the different and competing needs into a system that works reasonably well.
The same thing that makes people entitled to society expending resources on the very real, physical legal protection of intangible ideas that they 'own'.
Creative works aren't made in a vacuum, all creators take from the public domain. They have an obligation to give back to it.
Copyright and patent terms were designed to facilitate that. The endless extensions of the former were a cynical, self-serving attack on a public good.
> The Congress shall have Power…To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I do think there's something like a "right to ideas". Like you can't tell someone to just forget about something, things people experience become a part of them and I think it's reasonable to expect they should be able to share that with others.
I mean, after life + 70 years you already are entitled to other people's work. And a purpose of patents was to get people to release ideas so culture as a whole can grow from them, rather than just keeping them as trade secrets or whatever.
I absolutely think people should be able to receive some money for it, maybe even for life + 70 years, and people can always not release things, but I think once it's released it's not just yours any more, as it lives in the public conscious.
Remember that guy who had made a giant website with the word counts of a whole ton of books and authors lost their collective minds over it? I think a lot of writers sincerely believe he needed their "permission" to count the words in their books.
Most software you can buy is older than ten years. Do you want to lose copyright to every part of your product that has been stable? Imagine the useless churn as every company needs to make sure every library they use is substantially altered every couple of years to renew the copyright.
Public domain does not mean public. The source code could remain a trade secret.
More of an obstacle is competition from free past versions - a lot of people would be happy with a 10 year old version of Photoshop or MS Office. That's why I think it should be extendable to 20 years with a hefty fee (but not further, or only with a much heftier fee).
If you do not publish source code, your binaries should be ineligible for copyright protection. There is very little creative work in the binaries themselves. Keeping your actual creative work hidden (especially from things like eventually being part of the public domain) but yet still expecting to receive the privilege of copyright is inequitable. Same thing with only publishing under digital restrictions management.
That's impossible for a great number of reasons, at the very least the fact that the distinction between the source and the binary is irrelevant for copyright and impossible to define in the general case.
The GPL defines the source as the preferable working format to make changes and updates to the program, but you can see how that definition blows up in your face when there is no published source to begin with. "Your honor, that 50MB binary file that has a signature of a GCC compiled program IS the preferred working format for our company; indeed, it was created from temporary text files, but they were deleted as they were deemed unnecessary for a technically advanced company such ourselves. All further updates will be made in assembly language via binary patching, for maximum efficiency".
The distinction is that the binary is a derivative work with no added creativity. I'm not saying this is how things are today, but rather I'm saying this is how things should be. In order to qualify for copyright protection, one should have to put the created work in escrow so it can actually enter the public domain when the copyright expires. If one wishes to control access to their work with other mechanisms that prevent fulfillment of even the very lopsided bargain that was struck with copyright, then one shouldn't get the privilege of copyright.
Also if the best of your "great number of reasons" is fallacious legal reasoning of the type software engineers tend to be drawn to, then I don't think that's much of an argument.
Again, how do you prove my binary that I put in your copyright escrow facility is a derivative work and not a handcrafted assembly program? Sorry, but you are just uttering nonsense.
Do you think the idea of binary analysis does not exist? Or that courts don't have a long history of deciding questions of judgement? The problem is also fundamentally quite similar to proving that a published binary is/isn't a derivative work of someone else's work.
Also handcrafted assembly isn't sufficient for your argument, but rather one would have to directly write a binary with a hex editor. Show me any binary larger than say 1 MB that was written with a hex editor. So really the burden of proof would be on anyone claiming that a large binary is direct creation.
> the burden of proof would be on anyone claiming that a large binary is direct creation
That's not how any of this works. Once I've submitted my binary to the escrow, then it's an original work worthy of copyright until challenged. If someone breaks my copyright, I simply assert my originality and get an injunction against it by default. If the adversary claims my work is a derivative, then the legal burden is on them to prove it - because they are the ones rising it as defense against infringement. So I've already quashed 90% of adversaries by this point just by legal intimidation.
Also, you are attacking a strawman version of this problem. In practice, what will be submitted to the repository are binary object files for the core proprietary sections that are unlikely to be changed, for example the file format definitions to preclude interoperability. Anything else can be source, the final linker step is automated etc. The market will also offer tools for binary randomization and compiler signature obfuscation.
So you are left with a technological arms race that needs to be settled in court, on a case by case basis, using expert testimony where the burden of proof belongs to the infringer. It's just absurd to think anything like this could ever work in practice to promote source availability, or there would be public benefits to put such a highly litigious system in place.
> That's not how any of this works. Once I've submitted my binary to the escrow, then it's an original work worthy of copyright until challenged
Are you referring to some existing system? Because otherwise we're discussing in the abstract how this could work. And it would be straightforward for the copyright office to have a rule prima facie rejecting machine-executable binaries being claimed as original works, unless compelling proof were submitted that it had been directly created. Because as I said, show me any substantial executable that has been directly created with a hex editor.
The idea of a company choosing a few critical parts that they then (honestly or dishonestly) claim as original binary works is interesting. But note that this still would go a long way towards making the overall work part of the public domain when it expired - such blobs are highly unlikely to contain references to libraries with API churn and whatnot. And even if they somehow do, since they are small enough to be directly worked on, they can be directly fixed.
Then those who wish profit without sharing will just offer SaaS instead of binaries. Exactly as they do with a significant amount of copyleft-licensed software today.
Pulling back copyright doesn't necessarily force people to share -- people can also keep secrets. A primary purpose of IP law is to encourage sharing.
The point is that if it is not actually working to encourage sharing, as is the case with DRM, compilation, or SaaS, then there is no longer a justification.
Hopefully it does enter the public domain, and I'd be happy if that happened much sooner than it does today. But public domain rights are certainly not needed for people to enjoy the arts. Basically all popular media is enjoyed without the right of people to republish them. Ask anyone to list famous American media, and they will mostly list copyrighted works.
Sure. I think our disconnect is that I don't think it's appropriate to use the word "share" to describe this. Exchanging something for money is not "sharing", it's business. So when you said "the primary purpose of [imaginary property] law is to encourage sharing", I took that to be referencing when a work enters the public domain after the exclusive copyright term.
And my overall point is that a work that has been compiled/DRMed/etc will never enter (be shared with) the public domain even after the copyright term expires - rather it will still remain subject to the technical protections. And so I don't think it's at all appropriate to use the word "sharing" to describe such works.
The type of "sharing" that copyright was intended to facilitate is "make it part of the corpus of cultural works enjoyed by the people" in contrast to "art is something that rich people commission and then hoard in a palace". You can disagree with my choice of word if you want, it's orthogonal to the point I was making above -- people can access more media today than ever, art and culture is flourishing. Copyright (in general) is observably fulfilling the purpose it was intended to serve. Kings do not sit in their palace and listen to Taylor Swift and watch Marvel movies, the people do.
> compiled/DRMed/etc will never enter (be shared with) the public domain even after the copyright term expires - rather it will still remain subject to the technical protections.
You could argue da Vinci did the same with his underdrawings. And many other artists have similarly not shared their sources. You're making more of an argument about a right of collaboration, which is not only a completely different argument, it is the opposite of what copyright attempts to do, which is to give rights to the original artist.
If you're making the suggestion that artists should be compelled to share sources, I disagree and think that is extremely shortsighted. Sharing should be done voluntarily by the artist, and if they don't want to share their sources and methods, they shouldn't be required to. In absence of that right, chilling effects on artistic freedom are an obvious outcome. I love FOSS licensing, but those types of arrangements should be voluntarily chosen by authors, not compelled by the force of law.
Then isn't your argument just the standard imaginary property maximalist argument in support of creating a unilateral property right? All of that access/enjoyment/whatever you're talking about can still occur under the complete control of the publisher. Whereas copyright law at least purported to strike a balance between those receiving the artificially-created property rights, and the rest of society having created it for them.
And no I'm not talking about a right of collaboration. "Collaboration" implies the original author is still alive and even participates with some back and forth. I'm talking about the ability to simply use creative works after they're supposed to have become part of the public domain - not still locked behind the non-expiring technical block of digital restrictions management, not unusable due to API churn, etc.
StarCraft 2 is still competitive 14 years later. I’m not sure I’d personally have an issue with it becoming public domain but the game is still well-stewarded today.
Even Brood War is still satisfactorily supported 26 years after its release. Though I think that’s definitely long enough to consider the option of public domain.
#1 - It was LAN first, offline, distributed as Shareware. The forgiving netcode and leniency of distribution ended up with it as a standard install on any Internet Cafe on the planet in the early 00s. It also hit Korean culture at exactly the right moment for it to go so popular as to become a cultural touchpoint. There's a Malcolm Gladwell book in there somewhere - it literally became South Korea's unofficial national sport [1]
#2 - It was subject to a high-profile remaster as part of Blizzard's "Classic Games division", who also did rushed and careless remasters of Diablo 3 and Warcraft 3. The post-release monetization here is quite telling, as it was basically all aimed at the Korean market - popular South Korean StarCraft casters and Children's TV hosts providing the available announcer packs, with the main cosmetic being a chibi-'cartoonised' version of the standard asset pack.
The question is if that stewardship would be ruined by making it free to play the offline, single player version. More generally, would Starcraft2 and similar titles still would have been made if Blizzard knew it only had 10 years to recoup the costs?
The copyright lobby frames that question in a profoundly toxic way: are there any marginal profits that can still be milked for our IP portfolio? Of course there are, you can milk pennies even from "Steamboat Willie" and Chaplin movies, but that doesn't mean we should have perpetual copyright.
What matters is the first few years where 90% of the profits are made, that's what motivates the creator; motivating the creator enough to create and "promoting the useful arts" are the purpose of copyright, there is no "natural" right to one's ideas and creation. It's a social and political compromise for the good of all.
Would Blizzard have made Starcraft 2 at all if they had predicted the paradigm-shift towards microtransactions and cosmetics, with the 'game' itself as a loss-leader? This basically forced their hand to make the game free-to-play 7 years into the initial release cycle.
Indeed, Blizzard developer Jason Hall previously revealed that a single cosmetic skin for your horse in WoW made more money than the entirety of sales from Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.
The only reason that Starcraft2 is alive at all is the late-cycle introduction of a co-op mode, with microtransaction gated cosmetics, 'commanders', and commentator voicepacks. The online is all but dead, with almost no moderation and stewardship, and plagued by maphackers at all tiers. Even something as basic as the EU MMR brackets for tier ranking are completely broken for nearly a year.
FWIW starcraft 2 is free to play, just not “offline”. And only one single player campaign is free, the other 2.5 costs money. Continuing revenue is primarily generated via cosmetic sales.
It’s had 2 subsequent major changes with massive differences in units, game balance, and pacing … to the point of almost being three different games. The most recent and current era is called “Legacy of the Void” and is about 9 years old. Since then changes have been fairly conservative, mainly just unit stats changes. Though some “units” like infested terrans have been removed in the past nine years, which could be considered semi-major/semi-minor.
It gets regular balance updates. They've slowed quite a bit, but there was one in the last few months, and I believe the one before that was like 2 years or so.
There's also the matchmaking, which is a service they provide.
The issue here isn't so much, "Are Blizzard allowed to charge for SC2?", but "What would happen if Blizzard pulled the plug on SC2 servers?" It would very much be a shame if a game like that were suddenly ripped out of the culture.
The patches are for the Ranked multiplayer - the balance patches are literally to nerf dominating pro-players who found meta-breaking strategies. They're not designed to serve their core userbase and end make the game less interesting and more frustrating for anyone other than the top 64 Worldwide bracket.
The recent resurge of interest and player activity based on a wildly unbalanced and broken but fun 'Broodwar Units in SC2' mod is testament to this [1].
Does it? For single player games you can just still use and distribute the original, unpatched version.
I agree that there is lock-in with online multiplayer games, but it's more on the game servers than the distributed content. So it's only marginally a copyright issue.
I think the person above you meant “If the copyright clock for the original release keeps getting reset every time an update drops…” and you’re talking about “If each updated version gets its own copyright clock upon release”.
Copyright (and patent) law generally follows the latter in western nations, but there’s nuance because third-party derivative works can easily contain elements which the original IP owners might feel are “derivatives” of newer innovations from subsequent updates, even if the third-party feels they only based their work on the original release.
There’s often a lot of room for reasonable minds to disagree, and it can be difficult to create quality third-party derivatives which avoid any similarities to newer versions of the IP.
Think of creating a modern representation of Mickey Mouse. If you create a new version of Mickey Mouse based on the 1928 version in Steamboat Willy, it is difficult to make something that looks relatively contemporary without creating something that looks arguably derivative of the 1953 work “The Simple Things” or the 1940 work “Fantasia”. You could play it safe by using something that looks like a carbon copy of Steamboat Willy, but if your personal artistic vision involves a more contemporary art style, it is understandably difficult to make it unambiguously not a derivative of more recent depictions that are still under copyright.
For the Starcraft 2 example - in a thought experiment where the 14 year old “Wings of Liberty” version is now public domain but the 11-year old “Heart of the Swarm” expansion pack and current 9-year old “Legacy of the Void” version of StarCraft 2 are both still under copyright. You want to make a new single-player campaign which takes place after LotV and doesn’t retcon any canon events (many of which are still copyrighted). A careful creator would probably understand they couldn’t make any references to Amon being reborn and defeated by Artanis, because that plot is from the still-copyrighted Legacy of the Void. But would you be able to write a storyline that contains any acknowledgements that Zeratul died? (Zeratul died at the hand of his friend, Artanis, due to some of Amon’s mind-control machinations during that same LotV campaign)
I think a creator would have to be careful precisely how their storyline acknowledges Zeratuls death. If its just a few characters generically lamenting the loss of a great/controversial man…probably fine? What if the loss of their friend Zeratul was specified to have occurred “in battle” with no other specifics about the battle? I have no clue. If your storyline includes a tiny quip about Artanis dealing with unspecified guilt/shame over Zeratul’s unspecified death … then that might be technically infringing until LotV falls out of copyright, because some people may feel that it’s specific enough to be definitely derived from the LotV campaign.
Note that all three of these similar examples are where a creator does in fact intend to create a derivation of copyrighted materials to create a sequel campaign to the uncopyrighted work which is still “in-canon” with respect to still-copyrighted works. Its just exploring where is the line of “how much derivation can you morally and/or ethically and/or legally get away with before at least one reasonable person genuinely feels you have elements that are unambiguously derived from still-copyrighted content?”
For “legally” getting away with something you have to consider the costs of successfully defending yourself against lawsuits from notoriously overly-litigious corporations like Disney/Nintendo/Blizzard. Are you so safe that you could get a summary dismissal or is there any reason it could qualify for awards of punitive damages under Anti-SLAPP laws?
You make good arguments about derivative works on public domain works, where some other derivative works are still in copyright. That's probably difficult to maneuver legally.
However if the goal is to just distribute the original public domain work legally, then that's easy and convenient. That alone would be hugely beneficial for games.
A better fix would be to make copyright last 5 years from the date of publication. I'm betting that for the vast majority of copyrighted content the vast majority of the money is made in the first five years.
Copyright is a tax on society. It's not an inalienable right. We keep it for the noble purpose of encouraging authors to create. We don't want them to rest on their laurels. So why are we locking up all of our content for life plus 70? It sounds like a prison sentence.
The US Founders' Copyright was 7 years if you filed paperwork with a chance to file paperwork for an additional 7 years.
I realize that removing the paperwork saved the Government paying for a bunch of jobs and removed a source of accidental "got ya" style mistakes of subtly misfiled paperwork. But the paperwork was also meant to help archival purposes. There was even a time that everything filed needed to send a full copy to the Library of Congress, guaranteeing at least one archival copy. (But then publishing far outpaced the Library's physical space and ability to actually archive everything.)
We have the technology to automate the jobs out of the paperwork and maybe at least the possibility to build an endowment for digital archives that don't need to worry as much about physical space, so maybe it's also time to think about bringing the paperwork back.
The copyright cartel would fight that with their lives. They would rather destroy content forever than let it out for free, even if neither option costs them a cent.
“The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.“
For those of us not reading widely enough and/or not being raised in the American literary tradition, the quote is from John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" [1]. I have long been aware of the work, but reading this quote makes me regret not having read it yet.
Interesting, given that I remember from history lessons that it was more-less exactly as quoted.
Curiously, this also happens today. Grocery stores dump a lot of perfectly good food and other goods, and some of them figure that it can't be that someone dumpster-dives instead of buying, therefore they instruct employees to make the trash unusable. Example I've seen first-hand was when throwing away a perfectly good box of laundry detergent, they would open it and spill it into a container of perfectly good fruits and veggies, to make both unusable.
I'm not a freegan, but I knew a few at some point, and the stories I heard even in my local area, makes the quote feel 100% believable.
That particular passage, perhaps; however one can certainly believe growers destroying an abundance to control prices. It certainly doesn't sound like the purported overabundance of food was evenly distributed:
That piece was written literally by the same person.
Farmers were going bankrupt because there was so much food that they couldn't sell. It was the time when people developed the habit of eating meat daily, as people were buying out the food, and fed it to animals. There wasn't at any point a famine.
>Farmers were going bankrupt because there was so much food that they couldn't sell.
And the originally-quoted passage is about farmers destroying crops as part of price controls due to overproduction.
Could you provide any kind of evidence that the supply of food was evenly shared? Steinbeck spent a lot of time with impoverished farm workers before writing the Grapes of Wrath, so I'm inclined to believe his description of them.
So, farmers destroyed their crops and starved. Is that how you understand it?
I'm not obligated to find a proof against fiction, when all real accounts show food prices almost halving in a decade, in fact I would be willing to speculate that the dust storms that came were in fact caused by the abandonment and large areas being left unsown, with no cover to hold the soil together.
>So, farmers destroyed their crops and starved. Is that how you understand it?
Wealthy farmers destroyed crops that weren't worth the money to sell, yes, and poor farmers went under. That's not a surprising idea, given that it continues to happen in our modern farming system all the time during periods of overproduction.
>I'm not obligated to find a proof against fiction
But you might be compelled to give some counterproof to Steinbeck's non-fiction reporting, which was also linked above.
All first hand accounts of the dust bowl talk about sandstorms bringing sand, everything getting burried in sand. No first hand accounts seem to talk about fields getting stripped of soil, that was documented after the fact. This suggests that the source of the dust were fields that had been abandoned.
It doesn't even make sense, Oklahoma isn't dry, the American south is very humid.
>You can't have an excess of food and famine at the same time.
Sure you can. Food supply is not just a question of production, you also need logistics and will to distribute. There is currently a global food surplus, but areas of the world are still undergoing famine.
>in fact food prices were dropping
Up to 1931. If you look at the data into the actual Dust Bowl years, 1932 to 1936, prices go back up significantly.
>It doesn't even make sense, Oklahoma isn't dry, the American south is very humid.
But the Dust Bowl occurred in an extended drought period when Oklahoma was incredibly dry. And while it's true that topsoil was lost from fields that weren't farmed, those fields were fallow because of the drought - crops couldn't be grown in the dry conditions.
500mm isn't low by any means, it's moderate. Almost all Europe has around 500mm annual rainfall. It may seem low compared to let's say Mississippi, but that is because Mississippi is as wet as it gets outside the tropics.
The fields were abandoned because the prices were so low that cultivating them wasn't profitable. This in fact could have caused the drought as well, as much of the rain in such climates is recycled - the water that evaporated rains back down. And, it can't evaporate well without plants to bring it up from the soil, but only the surface dries out. This might have lead to the dried out top layes getting repeatedly blown away, until the fields got successfully overgrown, and the rains returned.
Oh boy, this book was very popular in the USSR, depicting a complete failure of a capitalist society.
The irony is that the soviet socialist society failed way, way harder and that average soviet family was far more impoverished than the evicted farmers from the book: those gringos had a car!
So limit the changes to works the copyright owner intentionally distributed to more than $threshold people. Have it only apply to situations where the number is tracked already, e.g. due to commercial obligations. Or something. This does not seem like an insurmountable problem.
Then you're bringing into the question why the rights that someone gets is different depending on how people exercise them. What's the right threshold? What does it mean to intentionally distribute? Are we going to have protracted court battles over what tracking numbers are accurate or valid? Could those who want to abuse this (big business) simply work around it by making it infeasible to directly measure?
And also, the copyleft complication too: If Bob writes a FOSS app with a GPL license, and it becomes popular, but then Bob retires and stops distributing it, does the copyright expire?
I don't think the problem being discussed here is insurmountable to solve, I just think the proposed solution opens a whole new can of worms. I think a good start at a solution is to first shorten the duration of copyright.
Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.
* A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase, always remain available. If the only streaming service willing to pay to stream your movie has the smallest market share, too bad; the market has spoken on the value of your content. An ebook can fulfill this purpose for a print book; streaming can fulfill this purpose for a theatrical or physical-media film. But it must be available to maintain copyright.
* Compulsory licensing should apply; if Netflix wants to pay the same amount of money as the above-mentioned small market-share streaming service for the film, Netflix must be allowed to do so. The film's rights owner can demand more, raising the price for all, but if every outlet refuses, the film immediately goes into public domain. This process is reversible, but it would set a ceiling to prevent the owner from setting a ridiculously high price to prevent its availability.
* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.
* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes[1] without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.
Separate issue, but also very worthwhile:
* Streaming services must make all data regarding their content available in some standardized format. Consumers should be able to use one application to access all content they have access to. The creator of SmartTube (a very nice YouTube-compatible player) should be able to add the appropriate API support to search for and play Netflix/Prime Video/Disney+/Paramount+ content.
The above applies to software, too. Legalize abandonware!
Let’s say I make a painting and put it in the drawer, never to be seen again. Do I lose the copyright then and someone is permitted to come to my home and take it away? That’s just one example of possible implications. My point being, trademark is directly tied to the dynamics of the free market, while copyright only indirectly. And copyright is not forever.
> Let’s say I make a painting and put it in the drawer, never to be seen again.
Then you own that physical painting.
> Do I lose the copyright then
Yes
> and someone is permitted to come to my home and take it away?
No, but if you gave your friend Bob a copy of the painting, he's allowed to copy that copy as much as he wants once you lose the copyright.
The original copyright system-- you could only get the full term by extending 14 years in. That's maybe a little early. But making you pay a fee to keep the exclusivity and/or show recent use in trade makes sense.
> No, but if you gave your friend Bob a copy of the painting, he's allowed to copy that copy as much as he wants once you lose the copyright.
Wouldn't this require Bob to outlive the artist by many, many years? My understanding was that copyright extends well past the death of the original creator.
EDIT: I'm curious why this is downvoted. Am I incorrect about the length of copyright being decades past the death of the creator? A quick google shows that it extends to 70 years past the life of the creator, [1] which means that it would be quite unlikely that an adult who receives artwork from the creator would live to see the time when it's not under copyright. That is, even if the artist died the next day, it would be 70 years before the copyright expires.
I can't downvote you, but I presume that you're being downvoted because your comment seemed to not understand the context of the thread.
A. Someone proposed making copyright "use it or lose it"
B. Someone else said this could have unintended consequences, like people breaking into your house to take a copy of a work where copyright has lapsed.
C. I pointed out that's not how copyright works: it has nothing to do with control of physical artifacts.
D. You then presumed that the copyright runs for a long time, which contradicts the premise we're talking about in "A", and is completely out of left field. (In any case, it's irrelevant to the question in B-C; if I have the one of the only extant copies of something from a century ago, you still can't come take it to make a copy).
I used to make this argument until I came to know of law (at least in USA) that if you don't use your house and someone else starts using your house then they can claim the legal ownership of your entire house in as little as 10 years! It was very shocking and complete antithesis of property rights in US that are so dearly held. When you think about this, in long run, it might sometimes make sense that future generation can use what previous generation has built.
many countries have variants of this, for many years/since olden times. In my country, it is called 'hævd'.
Instinctively, it makes incredibly much sense to me, even more so than property law. The way I view it, it is precisely the foundation that ownership sort of rests on.
(ie, i respect 'we have been using this for a long time' more than 'our ancestors whipped everyone in the village').
No, those laws are actually a recognition of property rights. Although it has become a popular social media trope to criticize things like adverse possession and "squatters" rights as some evil thing, the reason they exist is to protect people from being kicked out of their homes by others exploiting lack of or technicalities in paperwork.
Let me give you some examples of why these laws are actually good:
* Adverse possession: Imagine someone has been living and maintaining a property for 30 years. They have a single family home, and a driveway. They have a fence around all of their property, and they pay taxes on all of the area. The footprint of the property is exactly as they bought it 30 years ago. Their property is beside a piece of undeveloped, unoccupied, unmaintained land. Today, a land developer purchases the undeveloped land, and they come up with a 100 yr old document that shows that the part of the lot where their driveway is should be part of their lot. The developer then demands that the fence be torn down, and the driveway be given to them, despite the fact that the homeowner bought the property that way, has paid taxes on and maintained that property for 30 years, and nobody has brought this up as an issue in the past 100 years.
* "Squatters" (really, tenants) rights: Imagine someone rented a home in 2020. They've been paying rent every month since then, on a month-to-month basis, without a written lease. In 2024, the home was sold to an investor who wants to renovate the home and flip it. The investor wants to flip the home as quickly as possible, so they tell the tenant to leave immediately with no notice. They call the police and tell them that someone is squatting in their home. The police tell the owner that they must file for eviction, because they are not capable of determining whether the person living in the home is a "squatter" or a tenant. Only a court can do this.
Adverse possession is really just a recognition that mistakes made a long time ago shouldn't undo current realities. And "squatters rights" are really just a recognition that tenants don't have to defend their own property rights in front of a cop on their front porch at 2am on a Tuesday, they get to defend their rights to their leased property in court.
No, because thats theft. Its more like if someone took a picture of it and reproduced it for sale. In that case you would likely lose a copyright claim in practice, even if you may have a valid claim in theory.
IIRC a part of copyright "activating" is publishing the content in the first place, so I don't think GP would have a good case to begin with, not that it matters.
Copyright does not require public publishing of the content — just "fixed in a tangible medium of expression". This would have been accomplished when the painting was created on paper.
This is essentially what I was referring to in the second sentence. Even under the current system you might theoretically have a claim, in practice you'd have a hell of a time proving it, so it wouldn't tangibly change the outcomes like OP is suggesting.
> Let’s say I make a painting and put it in the drawer, never to be seen again. Do I lose the copyright then and someone is permitted to come to my home and take it away?
If you paint something, show to a few people, then decide to put it in the drawer, nobody cares. However, if you displayed that painting in galleries for the past 20 years, became semi-famous for it, and then decide to destroy your work, I'd say the public has a stake and a right to say "no", to at least make and preserve some copies. On top it being an asshole move to destroy well-known work, even if you have the right to do it.
> And copyright is not forever.
It effectively is if you destroy the work before your copyright on it expires.
So then make the rule just for cheaply copiable media. Copyright already has lots of specific rights that only appear to certain forms of media, e.g. the right to broadcast exists for movies, but not for statues.
Back when Walt Disney started, copyright was 28 years. That was good enough for him to get started producing a media empire. The Berne Convention requires 50 years-why not just go back to that standard instead of the 95 years today?
95 years for works for hire; 70 years + life of the author if they make it themselves.
There are very few pieces of work that their authors are still getting benefit from, but could be lost to history. Documentaries have to be censored to remove elements now that require licensing of materials.
Walt Disney got his start remaking old works (public domain) into new ones. How many Walt Disney's are we preventing from letting them make better use of Mickey Mouse? We will find that out soon when the trademark Disney has been trying to impose gets challenged.
This has the nice benefit of encouraging companies to make good use of their works as much as possible in the limited time instead of holding out to get a better deal.
>Free content removed by previously benevolent publisher.
I don't know about that. Regarding "free", it was always under copyright and distributed restrictively (DRM, ads, and geo-blocking). And no comment necessary for "benevolent".
We need a new TVTorrents and EZTV equivalent site. We need some sort of distributed library with TOR like properties so that nobody can know who is ultimately storing the data.
The amount of information that is being lost is outrageous.
perhaps they want to get their material out of the training set feed trough of all the Sora-style models consuming anything and everything not nailed down with an as-yet non-existant source watermarking scheme that can pass through the most tormented AI digestive tract.
This is complete incompetence from their leadership who show no value to their own content. They could have easily auctioned off/sold very old content to someone else but that kind of thinking would be beyond their competency. It's no wonder they go in such huge losses despite of having loyal audience and monopoly over unparalleled content. To this day I cannot get over the fact that there are literally millions documentaries out there made with a lot of love and hard work but only available through DVD or mailing in a check to some dude. Similarly, lot of my favorite music albums are still on cassette tapes and never digitized online by their creators. Fortunately, audience did digitized them nicely and uploaded over to torrents and that's the only way to get them today. Same goes of out of print books and magazines. The producers of this content could have easily digitized it and uploaded over to some marketplace and made at least free coffee money for rest of their lives but surprisingly they just never get around doing it. IMO, it just expresses complete naivety and disregard to importance of their own content. They sure spent days and months of blood and sweat but can't get around to do a last mile of uploading files.
There is a huge startup opportunity here for folks who are willing to chase these content and do the last mile on their behalf.
They could have easily auctioned off/sold very old content to someone else..
That assumes they own the exclusive rights to the content. A lot of media has many rights holders (writers, music, etc), and you need to get them all to agree a sale or waive their right in order to sell. That could be expensive because it's involve lots and lots of lawyers. For a bunch of old comedy clips it might not make any commercial sense.
This sounds like regulatory failure creating a deadweight loss. IP rights were invented to further the creation and distribution of works in the arts and sciences; if they're making it prohibitively difficult we're doing it wrong.
> IP rights were invented to further the creation and distribution of works in the arts and sciences; if they're making it prohibitively difficult we're doing it wrong
They definitely further the creation, as we can't see the old stuff! I find music to be particularly bad here. People on Youtube can clip videos with fair use and talk over them, but any audio with music in needs to be muted, even if it's part of the fair use, because music is enforced so stringently.
If the copyright system were changed so that rightsholders were guaranteed to get paid, but didn't have veto over publication, how bad would that be? The reasons people usually justify copyright protection usually centre on rewarding the creators, and I think the right to stop people seeing your work is a harder sell.
There is of course a new question of how to set the price, but you could e.g. have an auction of some kind where the highest bid must be accepted.
(There are certainly notable cases like Mein Kampf where copyright has been conspicuously used to prevent further distribution.)
> If the copyright system were changed so that rightsholders were guaranteed to get paid, [...]
How much would they get paid? What if they wanted to hold out for more? Would every piece of copyrighted material be paid the same? Or would you normalise it per sentence or per letter? Or per frame in a movie?
Also to a first approximation we can treat all music as roughly interchangeable and we can measure the 'amount' of music eg by runtime or by song, so compulsory licensing can set some arbitrary fees.
You can perhaps do something similar for video, but it's hard to do that for all copyrighted material. Eg for a video game a single sprite has a very different value than some modules in the game's engine.
I dunno man, did you see what I wrote a couple of lines down? There are ways of selling things that must be sold, I mentioned auctions, but also you can get independent assessments like in the case of compulsory purchase/eminent domain.
I'm sure you could object to some particular solution I propose, but people much smarter than me have studied this kind of game theory extensively and there are a lot of options.
The normalization can be the same as licensing is done now, "per work", negotiating specific usages needn't change, except that the seller has to allow that each covered work be subject to at least one must-sell auction per e.g. year. They can even win the auction themselves if all the bids are too low.
Maybe I should have said so explicitly, but in that case the seller would have to pay someone else, e.g. a common fund for promotion of the arts, or general taxation, or to the other bidders in portion to their bids to compensate them for not having any way to access the work.
Are you arguing that the idea is impossible in principle? The details will depend on what sort of incentives you want to end up with, but I can't see yet that there isn't some reasonable solution.
You can probably come up with some messy compromise. But I'm not sure it's really much better than the existing system which already comes with fair-use constraints.
Or you could eg charge people a certain tax as a proportion of their self-declared value of the copyrighted material. (With the provision that they need to sell the rights to that material at the self-declared value to any comer or something like that.)
There is some system like this for music in Austria. I may record a new version of your song but it entitles you to a writers credit and some guaranteed amount of all revenue.
But is this content available somewhere else then? Should it not have been archived then or given to those who hold those rights so they could publish?
> They sure spent days and months of blood and sweat but can't get around to do a last mile of uploading files.
The people making these decisions didn't spend any time, blood, or sweat on producing this content. That's why it's so easy for them to discard it: they're only concerned with making (big) money, not figuring out how they can preserve content without incurring a loss. Which, IMO, should be the goal for older, historical content.
I'm pretty sure the money we're paying countries for wars would cover historical content preservation costs a gazillion times over.
> lot of my favorite music albums are still on cassette tapes and never digitized online by their creators.
Or worse. Rust In Peace was completely rerecorded by studio musicians and that's what you get if you look for it on Spotify or even buy a new CD today! To actually hear the album as recorded originally, you need to find a thirty-year old disc and just deal with the scratches.
GP is not quite correct. It wasn't completely re-recorded, but Dave Mustaine re-recorded many of the guitar solos on the album, and the whole album was remixed.
At any rate, it's not the same (classic, imo) album that was released in 1990.
Exactly, I'm not going to argue that artists don't have the right to re-release their material. It's the destruction of the original that to me is unconscionable.
Imagine this in a historical context, what if the publisher of Poe or Hemingway just decided to burn all their manuscripts and stop publishing because it was a better tax write off than their accountants though they would make on the lifetime sales of the work.
Because this is exactly what we are doing to future generations, lighting art on fire.
> This is complete incompetence from their leadership who show no value to their own content
Have you not seen the U.S.? It doesn't matter. The system is orchestrated to existing money-people making money simply for having it in the first place.
Even "bankruptcy" doesn't mean anything anymore.
Your interest or legitimate use cases do. not matter. At all. Ever. For entertainment or technology.
They can still sell it. We shouldn't assume because the webservers were shut down that everything is deleted and gone. When the article says it's "gone" they mean it is no longer available to the public.
What proofs do you have that he is doing that? I mean I'm not him and my first instinct if I saw your previous comment "What are you even talking about. When is the last time you went to comedycentral.com to watch something... This is giant self-righteous paragraph of junk." would be to downvote it.
I'd downvote it because of "self-righteous paragraph of junk." and because I strongly believe that historical content should be maintained.
I don't really care to recover my older account on my MBP with a dead logic board. Do you want me to recover a really old account for a measurement-contest
This is the same as Facebook/Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc. taking something down for "hate speech" or "community guidelines". OP reported my original comment the same way Paramount removed content. Bit of a double-standard. I advocate for torrent, to believe in a large corporation to up-hold content (like a comment on the internet, or a TV series) who is surprised it moved to a paid streaming service.
I don't think it's even possible for a user to down-vote a direct reply to their own comment.
I can't see the post you're complaining about; but based on the tone of the rest of your messages, maybe you were just off topic or rude-atop-the-soapbox and others flagged you?
One of my favorite food Youtuber Internet Shaquille just did an experiment where he released a short every day for a month and his AdSense revenue grew from $1500 to $7000 per month. Clearly Google is herding a lot of eyeballs and money over to Shorts to try and become a proper TikTok competitor.
You do realize YouTube is one of their main threats, and their main advantage over YouTube is higher quality? Giving treasure trove of quality content to YouTube in exchange for peanuts while shuttering their own, that would be a double whammy.
It used to be that we had production and distribution strictly separated. Several administrations have been particularly cozy with the media industry, for obvious reasons, and have basically given away the space to entrenched industry players and then removed most of the rules.
The idea that youtube should even be a threat to their content highlights one of the problems with this arrangement.
As opposed to making zero money, having your content be pirated and not having an official archive? Putting it on YouTube with ads would have without a doubt been the better option here
Higher quality of what? Content? YouTube doesn't make any, it just hosts it. Of UX? None of the big streaming services have anything remotely comparable in quality to YouTube's player, and given it is what it is, that's saying something.
> Content? YouTube doesn't make any, it just hosts it.
That’s a meaningless distinction for consumers. YouTube has some content of good production value among a sea of crap. Giving it more professionally produced content only weakens the old guard.
Is it that different from Microsoft bringing their games to PlayStation and Sony bringing older games to PC. This would be the equivalent of making PS1 generation games available on PC.
This is what happens when software developers sell the idea of "streaming", i.e., downloading and throwing away, instead of downloading and keeping. Meanwhile the price of offline storage has dropped precipitously as the popularity of expensive "streaming" has risen.
Online storage is relatively expensive but software developers sell the idea of "cloud" storage instead of offline storage. Eventually people want to cut costs. Overpriced "cloud storage" is a likely target.
Why are these ideas pushed on computer users despite contravening common sense. Answer: Greed.
The ability to purchase and download whole seasons of shows from iTunes was one of its major advantages. I bought all of West Wing ten years ago, and I know for a fact that it's all physically in this room, three feet away.
This is also the only way Ainsley Hayes can possibly manifest outside of Aaron Sorkin's imagination.
How much could it possibly have been costing them to leave old clips up? I suspect the really old stuff was pretty low traffic, file storage is ridiculously cheap, how much money could this realistically save them?
I'm sure it's not "zero" but I think I'm missing something...is it copyright savings or something?
You’re missing that they want you to subscribe to Paramount Plus, so they’re going to have all of their content there, where you pay them. They mention it in the press release.
Their company IS paramount plus now. It’s all going there.
Not according to the article: "Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+."
It's a real shame too because I might actually be tempted to at least burn a free trial of that service if they had The Colbert Report
I don’t know. It seems pretty clear the other methods of content delivery are going to be consumed entirely. If you’re a company that makes TV, I don’t see another choice.
At the end of the day they’ll all merge into a few streaming services but they cannot afford to sit it out.
"You’re missing that they want you to subscribe to Paramount Plus, so they’re going to have all of their content there"
Most of the comments here seem to have missed that, if true. I did not read the article, the headline implies otherwise, but that surely can be clickbait.
Verb tenses are not hard. I said all their content is going to be there, not that it is already.
They are betting the company on people paying for paramount plus, it would make no sense for them to have free content anywhere else. They’re moving it all now.
Don't be obnoxious. Paramount Plus already culled content in 2023 per the link I gave, they have given no expectation they will make all their back catalog available. Likely they will make more of it available, but not all like you are predicting.
Not much, but they'll benefit much more in the short term in reduced taxes by writing down those assets to zero.
Edit: this was downvoted, and I don't understand why. Am I wrong in thinking this action was made in pursuit of a write down? FWIW, this wasn't a thoughtless comment by a random Internet passerby; I hold 41,905 shares of PARA.
Lost media is a real thing, more and more so when the internet loses data we've stored. We think it is a premanent place and sure it might out live us, but nothing is permanent.
This isn't new. Lots of old (pre-Internet) media was lost forever because storage was expensive and it was considered not worth it. As an example, there are a bunch of Doctor Who episodes which are lost forever because the BBC back then didn't consider it worthwhile to keep them and overwrote the tapes.
They could have saved money by hiring developers who are cheap. Not cheap developers.
My team requested access to a tool in the company, and the finance department said it was too expensive to get an additional license. We fought for 6 months to get that license.
The moment we got access, we saw that everyone was on the high end plan, and not even using it as it was intended. We even saw an account called Sample-test that was costing upwards of $15k a month.
Now we pay $1000 a year.
Paramount+ rushed to get in the game. They even borrowed the plus in their name. Now they need those frugal devs to make it work and help save money.
This really highlights the need for something like a "right to culture". People deserve a way to personally preserve and enjoy the cultural artifacts that are important to them. I can mostly do that by buying digital music, but (as Jon Stewart would say) with TV and movies, ah-not-so-much.
> The move would appear to be part of continued belt-tightening measures at Paramount, which is more than $14 billion in debt, led by losses at Paramount+ and its aging cable networks.
Rates were low, the cost of servicing $14 billion in debt was $0.
CEO's had the company take the debt on, paid themselves fat bonuses and hoped that the little people downstairs would invent something new that would save the company.
You think Shari Redstone, who has 77.4% of the voting power in Paramount, just let her employees get rich at her expense? She hired them, she offered the compensation.
She paid the CEO $30 million a year to lose $30 billion in market cap (of which National Amusements share is $23 billion) in just 4 short years, so I would say that they got pretty rich at her expense.
Obviously, but your comment implied malfeasance on the part of the CEOs (“paid themselves fat bonuses”), whereas my comment illuminates you to the fact that the CEOs action’s and compensation were subject to a single owner’s approval.
That is about as market price as it gets. Also, if you dig into the proxy forms, I bet you would find those CEOs probably got paid in Paramount stock with various lockup terms before they could sell, so they probably didn’t make out as well as you think.
Yeah. Episodic streaming content has been incredible for the past few years, but now TV studio execs realized that indiscriminately pumping money into everything, all the time, inexplicably, isn't a good business move! So they've just started firing the big staffs they've picked up and cancelling projects. Because, when you realize you've been making irrational moves, the answer isn't trying to make rational moves– it's making equally irrational moves in the opposite direction.
The CBS Viacom merger was a cynical plan from the very beginning. It even drew shareholder lawsuits which they ultimately had to settle. The writing was on the wall as early as 2015, though, when the company started restructuring several core businesses in moves that I saw at the time as "thinly veiled cash grabs."
During a time when they could have been making deeper investments in these business and capturing large parts of a growing media market they completely ceded the space and any expertise they had in it all to pad their own paper value. Immediately after the merger they lost a lot of licensing revenue because they drastically overestimated the value of the corporate assets they cherry picked for themselves.
I'm guessing it's some sort of financial wizardry whereby the net present value of the archive is increased (on paper) by putting it behind a $50/clip paywall advertised only in trade journals.
In media one of the things we have to "deal with" is Sound Exchange. When we play a song, we have to keep track of that, and how many people heard it, then settle up at the end of every month with SX.
There should be an open royalty payments system for everything and available to citizens. So that I can credibly say, "look, I did pirate this entire TV series, but I want to pay the obligatory contract rate, and I want that money to go to the creators."
this reminds me of one of the only interesting use cases for blockchainish stuff. Lets say a movie would have it's unique id and links to creators, publishers, writers, actors etc together with how much they should be settled with.
You buy a movie and the creators get their proportion automatically. You now have the official version of the movie. You take the movie and make a fan cut and sell that, you are added to the chain as a creator, you specify your cut and all the creators continue to get royalties.
It doesn't stop piracy but it makes the royalty system transparent and it gives the creation an independent life. It distributes copyright or ownership I guess. Derivatives can also be worked on and sold easily. You could have any third party "popcorn" app that had this micro payment within it.
(In reality studios put up huge sums of money to finance a movie, this use case couldn't address that side, just the selling and distribution of digital things)
Suppose an alternative implementation where a media file contains a signed certificate of creatorship that can include other certificates (so your can cut would have a certificate signed by you, including as a payload the original certificate signed by the original creator). I can immediately see several attacks on this system, but I don't see an attack that blockchain would solve.
For example, the fan cut could just not include the original creator's certificate. I don't see how a blockchain would help in uncovering this. Maybe if the blockchain contains the full video files? Then you could use regular plagiarism detection software or ContentID-type systems to find possible rights violations. But then the blockchain size would quickly balloon beyond the point of usefulness, and also it's not substantially different from just putting all the involved media on public web servers for people to mirror.
Oh, they didn't delete it, they just jammed it all through some machine learning model that "compressed" it and will hallucinate it back for you on demand. What could be better than a work of art that automatically updates itself to the current sensibilities of the time?
Business as usual. Someone decided to earn more money :
"While episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website, you can watch Comedy Central through your TV provider. You can also sign up for Paramount+ to watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows."
When a work of art becomes known by the general public for some very short period, like 10 years, it should enter the public domain. That’s plenty of time for creators to profit. Art that has become part of our culture shouldn’t be owned by anyone.
It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially given that they provide access to top shows that people really want to watch. It's like having Breaking Bad-esque product but really screwing up when it comes to wanting people to watch it.
Given the extent to which the tech behind streaming platforms -- storage, CDNs, tie-ups with telecoms -- have been standardized (and democratized, to some extent) by big players like YouTube and Netflix, you would think that a basic ad supported layer of any of these studio specific platforms would make many multiples of what they actually need to put in to setup a basic platform.
The tech's cheap and they already have the content. Most of the older content would be relatively low traffic -- hell, most of these old topical Comedy Central late night shows barely broke a million views when they were new and I don't think jokes about Saddam Hussein and GW's folksy demeanor would click now. How much would it really cost for any big studio to let people view these archives? Am I missing something big that causes somebody like Paramount to go $14B in debt trying to get people to use their streaming service? Is it a function of the business they're in or is it just a case of LA movie studio types not understanding tech?
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